“The Cryptocurrency Diaries: A Day In the Life Of A Bitcoin”
Background:
“As tradition dictates, a cryptocoin’s name is comprised of the awardee of the block’s initials (Middle Name), a significant figure or idea chosen by the awardee (First Name) and the family of Cryptocurrency (Last Name).
The general rules for suffixes — Jr., Sr., III, etc. — apply.” — JaiChai
From The Diary of Siddhartha J.C. Bitcoin VIII
Aug. 29, 2017:
My birthday. I was born at 3:50 a.m. on the Bitcoin Blockchain with eleven and a half other siblings. Not sure if I should feel sorry for the half guy, but hey, that’s how it goes?
My uncle — who still addresses me as “Prince Siddhartha” because, even today, the Bitcoin family is regarded by most as royalty, the First Family of Cryptocurrency — told me that prior to July 9, 2017, the number of Bitcoins created per block used to be double.
The Bitcoin mining block rewards halves every 210,000 blocks. And on the trek towards the final block that creates Bitcoin number 21,000,000 in 2140, the next “halving” occurs around mid-June 2020 — creating a little over six Bitcoins per block.
30 AUG 2017:
Apparently I missed the Bitcoin fork. I understand that the scalability issues and unacceptable confirmation times were weighing heavy on the minds of everyone concerned, but that still begs the question if the proposed SegWit series of protocol upgrades is the panacea for our ills?
I wonder how the Bitcoin Cash — BCH — people are doing?
In the end, BCH viability really depends on the mining community. If miners support it, it will get stronger. I don’t believe the Cryptocurrency World is a zero sum gain scenario. I wish them luck.
31 AUG 2017:
Like everybody, I wonder where I came from. As best as I could ascertain, my lineage goes back to the early days of the Cypherpunks of the 1980's.
The creator of my family — Satoshi Nakamoto — is still an enigma. Who knows? Bitcoin’s “Lucy” might well be discovered to be an early species created by one of those Cypherpunk’s.
Currently, the majority believe Hal Finney created my family. He was one of the members of the cypherpunks who “coincidentally” lives near the man namded Satoshi Nakamoto — a man without a clue about anything related to Cryptocurrency, an obvious fall guy — and created a form of defunct digital money in the past. Additionally, Finney made the first transaction on the pristine Bitcoin Blockchain.
Before his death on 28 August 2014, the secretive Finney suffered from the end stages of ALS, was wheelchair bound and communicated through a computer-aided voice interface. Rare interviews were awkward and fruitless — limited to yes and no answers. I may never know my lineage?
Funny thing. Many people have publicly denied actually being Satoshi Nakamoto. But there was one who did — Craig Steven Wright. Staging a so-called “One and Only Appearance”, he later proved to be a fake. Lol!
1 SEP 2017:
A lot of people are against my family’s PoW — Proof of Work — setup. The harshest critics call Proof of Work — through mining — “an extortion imposed on users by the ‘Mining Mafia’ and generates a giant carbon footprint”.
This has given rise to non-mining cryptocoins like Ripple’s XRP, IOTA, NEM, etc. Ironically, the question of significant premine or instamine seldom comes up.
Instamining — as in the case of my family, Bitcoin — means that early adopters gain the lion share of the available coins.
Premining means that not all coins are available to the public but held by the founders or developers, or that the coins generated in the genesis block include coins from a pre-sale. These premined coins are supposedly used to cover the cost of ICO listing and future upgrades, development of the coin’s code, infrastructure, etc.
A few shady exchanges blatantly encourage cryptocurrency developers to take shares of their premine in return for a listing, instead of relying on the merits of their technology.
Sadly, most don’t realize this is a classic “Pump and Dump” scheme.
2 SEP 2017:
I spent most of the day pondering the PoS — Proof of Stake — “voting” process. Yes, I understand the rationale behind PoS — a way to nullify the creation of a powerful “Miner Mafia”. But won’t it just create another autocracy?
In PoS-based cryptocurrencies the creator of the next block is chosen in a pseudo-random way. The chance that an account is chosen depends on its wealth — stake.The blocks are “forged” — the blacksmith production process — or “minted”, instead of “mined”.
Almost all PoS cryptocurrencies are created at the beginning and the total available coins never changes — although some coins like Ethereum planned to go POS in the future and are considering to lift that restriction and create inflationary PoS ETH.
So, in theory, there are no traditional block rewards. The Minters — or should I say “Forgers”? — get the transaction fees only.
But In PoS, the highest chance of getting rewards go to the highest weighted holder — the holder possessing the largest account balance. In other words, the richest member has a permanent advantage.
IMHO, this can result in “centralization” — somewhat of a curse word in the Cryptocurrency Space. To me, in spite of PoS age-based selection — Peercoin — and PoS random selection based — NXT and Blackcoin, there still exists the chance of an autocracy emerging.
Proof-of-stake has a major riddle to solve. How can it make disbursement of minted block rewards more equitable when the whole premise is to reward those with the highest stake? And is the end product actually going to be better than the megawatt eating, politically powerful Mining Mafioso conditions of today?
I don’t know.
3 SEP 2017:
Usually, I hate the semiannual parties that my family hosts with the other Cryptocurrency Families. But today I learned some neat things. All of them related to their consensus mechanisms and the algorithm behind their cryptographic security.
My family uses Blockchain technology and SHA-256 — a hashcash cost function considered currently as top of the line security.
The Ethereum family — regarded as the second most influential Cryptocurrency Clan in the space — uses their Ethash algorithm. I met a particularly hot little Ethereum number named Annie, but stupidly mentioned their family’s DAO hack and subsequent fork. She immediately treated me like I had leprosy. (Heavy Sigh).
Other Blockchain families were the Monero family who use the CryptoNight algorithm. The Zcash family uses the Equihash and the Zcoin family uses something called the Lyre2RE algorithm.
But the algorithm that fascinated me the most was the one used by the IOTA Clan. They don’t use a Blockchain. Instead they use The Tangle — a DAG, Directed Acyclic Graph — and the Markov Chain Monte Carlo — MCMC — algorithm.
I wondered why my relatives told me to stay away from the IOTA people. But I guess it’s because they supposedly have capabilities that our family can’t do right now: Micro-transactions, no-fee transactions, no mining, no-division between users and network supporters, infinite scalability, and quantum computer resistance. Wow!
It will be exciting to see where the IOTA Clan goes from here, no?
My grandfather embodies the phrase: “The old tongue loves to wag”. I got stuck listening to him for over 30 minutes at the punchbowl.
He started with a monologue about how Ethereum surprised everyone in “the old days” by moving out of their prolonged “vaporware” stage into a strong platform. Then he went on to say, “The unrest that lead to the Bitcoin fork reminds me of the drama around the Ethereum fork and also resembled the Ripple vs. Jed McCaleb scandal that lead to the creation of Stellar from years ago.”
I’d heard of the Ethereum fork, but I didn’t know what Ripple — with their XRP cryptocoins — was all about. My grandfather just stood up and walked away muttering, “Damn those centralized, bank friendly separatists!”
Afterwards, a cousin told me that those Ripple guys are really just misunderstood and actually nice people. He said, “XRP from the Ripple Family are a hard working people and are a lasting member of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. If it wasn’t for them, the transition from fiat currency to cryptocurrency — via the current global financial system — would still be light years away.
Whatever that means?
4 SEP 2017:
While my father is busy registering some property with the Factom family, I’m going to spend the afternoon learning about paid social media at my friend’s house. His name is Bradley J.C. Steemit.
Every family has embarrassments and skeletons in the closet. For example, my uncle is addicted to gambling. I’m pretty sure he’s also cheating on my aunt with some woman from the NoLimitCoin family.
Oh yeah, although my hopes of romance with that Ethereum girl is near impossible, a new girl showed up at school today. Oh my God! She’s beautiful. She’s asian — I think Chinese — and has a last name of NEO?
Anyway, got’ta bounce now. Plan to write again tomorrow…
JaiChai has been in the cryptocurrency space for many years. He’s known for submitting philosophical and contrarian posts on most cryptocoin forums.
Originally published at https://steemit.com on August 28, 2017.
